GERMAN ARMIES INVADED THE SOVIET UNION, opening hostilities on a front of 2,000 miles, from the White to the Black Sea. The German invaders, with their allies, the Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, and Finns, were estimated at over 3 million men. The Russians were credited with 2 million men under arms, and an indefinite reserve. Churchill promised that Great Britain would extend all possible aid to the Russians. The German invasion of the Soviet Union, combined with conquests in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans, brought millions more Jews under Germany's influence. The Nazis already practiced extermination against “Bolsheviks,” and special “intervention squads” (Einsatzgruppen) accompanied German attack forces with orders to liquidate Communist Party officials and Jews.
Kiev and Poltava were stormed by the Axis forces, which continued their victorious advance to Orel (Oct. 8), Bryansk (Oct. 12), Viazma (Oct. 13), Odessa (Oct. 16), Tanganrog (Oct. 19), and Kharkov (Oct. 24). By the end of October the Germans had entered the Crimea on the southern end of the vast front and had commenced the siege of Moscow in the north. The Soviet government transferred its headquarters to Kuibyshev.
The FIRST SOVIET PROTOCOL, signed at Moscow, provided that Great Britain and the U.S. would supply materials essential to the Russian war effort for nine months. Purchase of American supplies was speeded by extending the Soviet government a credit of $1 billion (Oct. 30). This was supplemented (June 11, 1942) by a master lend-lease agreement whereby the U.S. promised to supply the Soviet Union with such materials and services as the president might authorize. In return the Soviet government pledged that such articles or information would not be transferred to a third party without the consent of the president. The arrangement was to continue until a date agreed upon by the two governments and materials unconsumed were to be returned to the U.S. at the end of the emergency.
